Ask HN: Are you lost / confused / stuck? I can try to help

94 points

4 years ago

Ok this is quite a different kind of Ask HN, but I just can't help but feel saddened whenever I come across personal posts about how someone is lost, confused, stuck in a situation, feel lonely, uncertain what to do about xyz, etc.. What's more surprising to me, is how the comments mostly center around external solutions. I love the HN community and how good you folks are at helping people navigating the world. But, sometimes, at least sometimes, what we're missing is a way of navigating the inner world (which includes close relationships).

And surprisingly (or not surprisingly), the conventional methods like self-help advice or even therapy sometimes don't seem to help. I know this feeling, and had to explore around to find the tools and perspectives that finally made a difference.

Now I don't mean any kind of mystic / uber-spiritual stuff. I'm a pretty realistic guy; I just think a lot and feel a lot and had to go through a lot of inner work / personal development to get to where I am today. (If you want an idea what kind of person I am in real life, my personal instagram is https://www.instagram.com/samhuang.sh/ Feel free to read my posts to get a sense of my style and my experiences.)

To get to my point, I want to start some kind of service/platform where people can come to talk things through and have a sustained conversation about their experience of feeling lost, confused, stuck. (I won't be charging for this ever, because I don't believe in that. Though I'll probably have donations set up, but that's technicalities.)

I've been giving some people at work some advice and perspectives, and they were positively surprised by the things I talked about and it seemed to help them at least get out of the cloud of confusion. I'm not trained with any formal credentials, but somehow I've developed enough wisdom in this area to have useful things to say.

The problem is, because I don't quite know where my "strengths" and "expertise" are yet, I don't wanna just start some Substack and make a fool out of myself pretending to be some guru when I don't know what I'm doing yet.

So here in this thread, I'm hoping to invite people who are struggling with feeling lost, confused, stuck, for whatever reason, to come and seek help. And I'll do my best to see if I can offer perspectives that may be useful. It'll be a place where we can go deeper into some issues and have a sustained conversation about it all. And it would also be tremendously helpful to me to get some feedback on whether it did or did not help.

Much love, Sam

EDIT: For the record, so far the type of advice that seemed to resonate with people has been regarding relationships, inter-personal dynamics, family conflict, parenting, friendships, etc. A lot of times, our problems with the self stems from problems in our relationships, and vice versa.

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